Top 6 Guidelines for a Successful Business Intelligence Strategy in 2022
Business Intelligence is using data to form insights in a visual format. With Business Intelligence, you can take multiple layers of data from multiple sources, organize them, and analyze the data to prepare dashboards. Dashboarding, Analysis, and Reporting are three of the most important processes of BI utilization.
But today we’re going to take a step back and look at what goes behind the utilization and what transforms into a successful business intelligence implementation, i.e. BI Strategy. And before we get into what steps are needed to have a successful BI strategy, let’s take a look at what a Business Intelligence Strategy is.
What is a BI strategy?
Business intelligence strategy is your Blueprint i.e. your vision of the corporate strategy to decide on how to utilize the data. In this, the process, solution, and architecture for the implementation are laid out. But why do you need a bi strategy? It is because just deciding on the platform and implementing it is not enough to get the ROI on the software that you decided to use. Only with detailed steps about the deployment, analysis, and how the process would be streamlined, this can be achieved.
For a successful implementation, defining a BI strategy with assessment, planning, and execution steps is key.
Top 6 Guidelines for a Successful Business Intelligence Strategy
Follow each of the steps in this business intelligence strategy guidelines to essentially form your BI Implementation roadmap. This would help in better adoption and implementation of your BI services.
Guideline 1: Assess your Current Ecosystem
This is required to establish the baseline of the starting point. At this stage, data utilization by most of the organizations would be siloed and some parts of it would have some data analytics practice in place. So, there is a need to establish the parameters of the Business Intelligence platform by talking to all the stakeholders that would be involved in both the implementation and the utilization of the platform after implementation.
Some of the questions that you need to answer might be regarding what business problems you are looking to solve, what capabilities are you looking for the platform to have, and are the current capabilities of your organization are capable to have the platform, if not what additional capabilities might be required.
Guideline 2: Establishing Vision and Roadmap for Implementation
After asking the right questions and assessing your infrastructure, we can establish your roadmap for implementation with the vision of your BI strategy. The vision of your BI project can involve the key parameters, how they would be embedded in the operations, knowledgeable guides, etc. In addition to the vision, the roadmap should be laid down.
With the roadmap, enterprises can focus on the overall strategic value rather than isolated costs. At this stage stakeholders can be mapped to the processes and critical and bottleneck issues can be identified from the same.
Guideline 3: Establish BI Governance and Sponsor
By a sponsor, we mean identifying the funding process and about the allocation required not only to launch the project but also to sustain it over a period of time. Only with proper fund allocation can Governance be achieved. The key stakeholders with the understanding of the company’s strategies and how to translate them into reality have to be mapped for the implementation and governance.
Guideline 4: Change Management
Before the implementation, it is important to align divisions like IT and higher management for the forthcoming changes. Lack of executive buy-in is one of the reasons why BI implementations fail, therefore to prevent this it is important to align the IT team and the business development teams.
BI Implementation should be viewed as a long-run strategy but not a short-term project. By bringing the IT and the business entities together on common ground, a successful implementation is possible.
Guideline 5: Establishing KPIs and Data Dictionary
Though establishing a data dictionary can be time-consuming, it is of vital importance to take the time to define parameters. BI as a project is for the organization as an entity and not for siloed divisions. With consensus definitions and business calculations, organizations can ensure consistency among various divisions like Sales, Finance, and Marketing to make sure all the numbers match.
In this process, identifying the right KPIs is also essential. Though during the process it would feel like keeping a track of all the KPIs would be better. The best process would be to identify the critical KPIs while keeping some room to expand later. Thus, identifying these KPIs which align the business objectives is important, while maintaining a constant definition of these across divisions.
Guideline 6: Building trust and ensuring the continuance
We are talking about this last because according to chronology this comes last. But building trust is one of the most important things that have to be kept in mind throughout the process, as there can be multiple ways to reduce the credibility of the entire process but only consistency can keep it credible enough.
Right from preventing faulty data to entering the BI ecosystem to ensuring having proper security levels to the data and the reports assigned have to be monitored. Specific stakeholders have to be assigned to a respective multitude of tasks. IT teams have to make sure that the technical environment is secure before the project starts.
Also, you can revisit your BI strategy and maturity models created at regular intervals like a year, to ensure that you are going in the right direction and the metrics that were created are right on track.
Effective strategic BI implementation
In conclusion, it is important to keep multiple divisions like IT and business teams aligned throughout the implementation process. Also before deploying by establishing the reporting structure for the BI team you can create an organizational chart in case of queries. The team should also ensure that the desired levels of permissions have been given to the end-users and the implementation should be done in phases with feedback as a process throughout.
Lastly, there can be a Business Intelligence Competency Centre established with pooled resources of skilled and experienced professionals that can be distributed across business units. This can be the key driver in taking up new initiatives when required.
